The Pattern of Life II - Male and Female

The pattern of life is even more robust. 

With all things in life there’s a male and female component. They are as opposite as can be and yet, once reconciled, we see they had been parts of the whole all along. 

The male represents pure energy and unlimited inspiration, we called this stage one. The female essence brings to fruition, brings forth life, stage two. A seed is an idea, carrying all the energy and knowledge of what can be, the genetic code, necessitating the female womb, the female home, to actualize this potential. Female energy nurtures and creates the reality of the male. What results is what we called transcendence, the going beyond of limitations. 

The male essence gives forth and the female essence receives, accepts. Zachar, male, means infinite memory and represents unbounded light. The word nekeva, female, means to make specific and connotes limitations and borders, a vessel. As we know, a vessel contains and gives shape to what it receives, it concretizes the abstract light of the male. 

Parent/child and teacher/student relationships are much the same. The parent and teacher gives, male energy, and the child and student receives, female energy. Like the light of above, what is transmitted over must be what the vessel can hold. Any more and it will break, any less and there will be a void. The proper teachings are what the student can accept. 

Our knowledge has this same pattern as well. The male essence relates to chochma, wisdom, the expansiveness of knowledge, and knowledge for its own sake. The female relates to binah, understanding, the internalization of the nuances of this knowledge. The female dimension learns to put into practice. When they come together, they form da’at, the transcendence of this knowledge as it is internalized and one with us. Da’at is what we know intrinsically, woven into the very fabric of who we are.

We see this in the ways we spoke about as well as in our inherent roles. According to Torah thought men are responsible to provide their wives three things; children, a livelihood and Torah. As women, it is our mission to take these initial, raw moments of inspiration and create beauty with them. It is our privilege to work the seeds and actualize their potential. We nurture and raise our children to be who they will be. We create warm and beautiful homes out of houses and we take the Torah of our husbands and transmit it to those around us, we live its reality. 

The Torah itself is of the male essence necessitating the female manifestation of the mitzvot to actualize it in the real world. Each needs the other to reveal its fullest expression.  

There are elements of both male and female energies in everything that was created in the world, including, and especially, us. We draw from these conflicting energies throughout our days and lives, very often moving back and forth between the two within the same moment. It's this perfect harmony of opposites which leads us to transcendence. 

May we beautifully blend the opposing pieces of ourselves and live the symphony of life to its fullest melody.